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ON A QUIET BLOCK ON Manhattan's Upper East Side is a townhouse different from all others in New York. Inside, up two flights of stairs, is one of America's most storied gun rooms.

It is here that Peter Horn of Beretta, the fabled gun maker, presides over the international world of high-end shotgunning. He's like a shaman who turns sporting-life fantasies into realities, and realities into memories.

Horn, a former professional hunter in the Sudan, dispenses advice, arranges hunting trips to exotic locales, and sells some of the world's finest shotguns. Some Berettas cost more money than cars; a few are more expensive than most homes.

On any given day, some $2 million of shotguns line the walls of Beretta's Madison Avenue gunroom. You can spend a few thousand dollars or as much as $325,000 on a handmade Beretta S0-10, a deadly piece of art that even has its own Website. The most expensive shotguns have wooden stocks made of exquisite walnut used in fine furniture. The engraving on the receivers—the metal housing that cases the firing mechanisms that ignite shotgun shells—is etched by engravers who spend 20 years perfecting their craft before they are recognized as masters.

In the gunroom, you'll bump into senior executives in town for board meetings, who stop by to talk guns and hunting or to shop. You'll meet financiers, some of whom own or run major investment banks and top private-equity firms. And on certain days you'll bump into the only columnist at Barron'swho loves shooting and hunting.

When you pick up a shotgun, many worlds reveal themselves. You could be in Scotland shooting grouse. You could be walking behind finely trained hunting dogs at one of the old plantations in Thomasville, Ga., America's quail-hunting capital. You could be out West, after pheasant and striding the plains beneath a big sky, or in a duck blind in one of the flyways that crisscross America, waiting for the first light.

If game birds aren't for you, the world is filled with clay birds. There's skeet shooting, or shooting from different angles at bird stand-ins—clay discs—that are flung across your field of vision from two towers. And there's trap shooting, which entails standing behind "trap houses" and shooting at discs moving away from you. Then there are sporting clays, which involve both disciplines on much more elaborate courses designed to simulate the hunting of ducks, geese, pheasants, dove, quail and rabbits. Six different sizes of discs are used to mimic the size of game. As in the other two forms of clay shooting, the faux birds are propelled at high velocity by machines similar to those used for tennis practice.

All told, shooting sports are fast winning new devotees. Though shooting is mostly hidden in a world of country estates, gun clubs, gun dogs and hunting grounds, there are unmistakable signs of growth. Membership in the National Sporting Clays Association climbed nearly 50% over the past decade, to about 22,000. And, for every NSCA member, there are probably five other recreational shooters who haven't signed up, says Robert Crow, the group's director.

Demand for good shooting instructors is surging. More than 2,000 people have completed the National Rifle Association's Shotgun Coach Course, up from 500 just a few years ago. Long a fixture on the English shooting scene, instructors like these are, in some parts of the U.S., in as much demand as good golf coaches.

Shooting schools are on the rise too. Though I was initially skeptical of these—none of my hunting companions would pay someone to teach them to shoot better—I recently signed up for a one-day class at one of the best schools, Orvis' Sandanona Shooting Grounds in Millbrook, N.Y., about two hours outside Manhattan. I was curious to see what they were teaching and, frankly, my skills needed a little sharpening.

GROWING UP IN THE SOUTH, I was always around guns and hunting. I have many fond memories of Saturdays spent with my dad at a gun club outside of Atlanta. He taught me to shoot a .22 caliber rifle when I was eight years old. Then he taught me how to shoot pistols. When I was about 12, he taught me to shoot a 12-gauge shotgun. I remember coming home from the club with a deep bruise on my shoulder. I was proud, though. I had shot well.

As I grew older and spent more time in offices than in duck blinds, I lost some of the natural athleticism of youth, the energy that lets you shoot with ease and accuracy.

Even under the best circumstances, accuracy with a shotgun can be hard to come by. Many shooters see moving targets, snap their shotgun into position on their shoulder, slap the trigger and bang. That's how the good guys shot rifles in Westerns, and the bad guys usually fell. But it's exactly the opposite of what James Ross, Orvis' chief shooting instructor, counsels. You have to think of all the components that make a shot, especially matching your barrels to the speed of the target.

I was given similar advice by Charlie Conger, who helps run the Mashomack Preserve Club, a private hunting and shooting club in Pine Plains, N.Y.

"The shotgun is a weapon of mobility. The rifle is a weapon of immobility," Conger says. He should know: He's one of the best shots in America.

The shotgun can also be a weapon of mystery. Though shotgun shells are packed with lead pellets that exit the barrel with great velocity in the shape of a cone, it is difficult to consistently hit moving targets. This is why Sir Joseph Nickerson, one of England's greatest shots, had two Latin plaques hung over his gun room's doorway. On the way out to the field, one said, in Latin, "About to be humbled." On the way back in: "Having been humbled."

I did not see such signs around Mashomack, or Sandanona, but I thought of them often as I tried, with varying success, to consistently smash clay birds as they arced across blue skies.

ORVIS HAS OFFERED SHOOTING LESSONS for about 30 years, and taught more than 10,000 people from all over the country. The company's instructors do a fine job making certain everyone understands what it takes to shoot well. At Sandanona, originally built as a 300-acre private hunting club, classes begin at 9 a.m., but coffee is always brewing in the centuries-old clubhouse, so anyone who arrives early can soak up the ambience

While I took a day of private lessons with Ross, many people opt for group lessons that last one or two days. For more experienced shots, I think the one-on-one lessons are best, because you spend more time in the field and less time in the classroom learning about firearms safety and the basics of good shooting (which more advanced shots already know, even if they aren't able to shoot that way).

What unites shooters of game birds and shooters of clay birds is a discipline I was vaguely aware of, yet could not enunciate, though I am convinced that my hunting dog, Gus, knows it well. When I miss shots in the field that Gus expected me to hit—and him to retrieve—a low grumble fills his throat and he looks at me with grave disappointment.

This discipline of consistently fine shooting that Orvis' Ross helped me identify and practice, and which Conger exemplifies, is counterintuitive. Though clay birds hurl across the range—and I have seen ducks move at what seemed liked 60 miles per hour above Montana's Missouri River on a cold December morning—a good shooter moves slowly. Motion is tight and controlled.

Stepping up to the line of a sporting-clay station is like getting into position on a baseball diamond, or at the start of a boxing match. Feet are about shoulder width. The body is relaxed. When the command is given to launch the clay bird, the target is acquired in a fraction of a second. The speed of the shotgun's barrels are matched to the target's trajectory. In an instant, the butt of the shotgun is nestled into the shoulder, the trigger is pulled, and the blast reaches out like a frog's tongue and shatters the clay bird.

At Orvis' Sandanona, the biomechanics of good shotgunning are dissected and studied according to the discipline of Robert Churchill, an English gun-maker whose book, Game Shooting, is the bedrock of good shooting. Spend a few hours at the school, and you'll learn what is needed about how a shooter stands, the ballet of moving your feet and body to respond to different angles of the bird, the swing and the gun mount. Spend a day ($575 for private lessons) and you'll learn even more.

Ross stands behind students as they take aim, like a soft-spoken psychologist who knows how to shoot. He explains shots that will be taken before they are taken, and the flight path of clay birds that soon will whirl across terrains and angles that mimic game- bird shooting.

Ross even films students with a video camera that he brings to the range. He got this idea from golf instructors. On film, you see what you did wrong, but in truth, if you have a sense of your gun, of the target, of yourself as a shooter, you know when you will miss the target before you pull the trigger.

Even now, as I ready for the start of hunting season at my gun club, I hear the incantations of my instructors as they coached me through the paces of a well-placed shot. Move. Mount. And swing. The cadence reminds me of the metronomes musicians use to pace song tempos. My buddies may snicker, but learning that song was well worth the money.